Catastrophes of Brimstata

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All the curses that brought us here…

This content is a part of Galvyria.

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Index / Lexica / Timeline

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A little girl looked on her favorite tree. Glittering lime and emerald, the tree danced and sang in the morning breeze. She giggled and smiled, dancing along with it. The winds changed. A woman, blindfolded several times over and enrobed in what looked like stitched-together meat, sauntered over to the girl. Without moving her lips, she asked why the girl loved the tree so much. The girl pointed to the leaves and babbled in nonexistent words. The woman smiled with an expression of peace, and walked over to the tree. She lay a single fingernail into the trunk, at which point the tree contorted and wailed, turning a bright crimson and dripping with burning blood. The girl shrieked in horror as the woman lifted up one of her many blindfolds. The burgundy eye that stared at the girl reflected only the ashes of her ashes, the girl's whining having been returned to the void by the Witch's empty fire.

The Catastrophes of Brimstata were a collective of over 30 individuals bordering between monster and intelligent force of evil. While all once sharing a connection to the world's coreheart, the exact origin and goals of each Catastrophe vary wildly. The first multitude were created by the Witch of Armageddon as corruptions of concepts that she felt would scar the people of Brimstata the most. However, one other Catastrophe, the Mother of Hellfire, did have a hand in the creation of several more, even producing 12 more Catastrophes on her own.

Witch of Armageddon

Haemathesia, more commonly known as the Witch of Armageddon, represented the combination of two other terrifying evils. She was the unholy and perfect merger between cold, cruel detachment and insatiable bloodlust. Born in Brimstata's skies with a will to turn the universe around her unrecognizable, the Witch of Armageddon's true aspiration was to become queen of a realm consumed by torment and impossibilities.

The Witch herself possessed two horrifying Echo-adjacent abilities. She could distort the very fundamentals of concepts she understood and touched. A particular habit of hers before she was first sealed was learning the beauty in an aspect of nature from local Brymasti before destroying it before their eyes. The other ability she once wielded was known as the "empty fire". It was not actual fire of any sort, but the way it flowed resembled it. The empty fire disintegrated objects into ash, and then reduced the ash to a simple airy powder that smelled of regrets and grief.

Had the Witch not been limited to Brimstata, she would likely have quickly realized her true capabilities and leveled planets. Even the small sliver of the Witch of Armageddon's power granted to her Vessel is enough to cause nations to tremble. It is for this reason that the Vessels of Dissent are seen as an authority above and outside of any nation on Brimstata. No nation, family, or settlement wants to risk the wrath of a Vessel of one of the Catastrophes. The full power of the Witch of Armageddon has the potential to cause an apocalypse that extends far beyond just Brimstata.

As the progenitor and most powerful of the Catastrophes, the Witch of Armageddon was feared across the world, even while sealed. Though the most tame and "benevolent" piece of her soul was rent for the Vessel creation process, it is said that a little bit of her malice lingers in the souls of her Vessels to this day.

The Spawn of the Witch

The Witch of Armageddon created the majority of the other Catastrophes of Brimstata. Through her malicious wanderings, the ranks of chaos grew, festering over the world of fire. The power each one possessed varied dramatically, ranging from a simple unkillable violent beast to a threat that could end nations when pushed to its limits.

Mother of Hellfire

The first creation of the Witch of Armageddon. Born of the flame from a sacred brazier in the middle of a sermon, the Mother of Hellfire was a corruption of an ancient religion of Brimstata. Her true name, Solwyn, was forbidden knowledge from all but the inner circles of that ancient religion. Her creation did not hinder its progress. It merely reshaped that old faith into the Children of Hellfire.

The Mother of Hellfire was originally worshipped as a nurturing deity who would help the flame of passion and magic grow in her faithful. After her rebirth by the hand of the Witch, this twisted into a frenzying perfectionism. She looked with scorn at the filthy Brymasti around her, so weak with magic, so unaligned with the flame. She strengthened them for a while, giving their Echoes more fire-attuning and making them resistant to burning, but it was not enough. The Mother of Hellfire sought a flame that could burn anything into nothing - concepts, structures, other fires, people, even the Witch of Armageddon herself. She called this project the "perfect fire", and began attempting to create it.

In her fervent research into flames, the Mother of Hellfire found that fire mixes quite a bit more with other aspects of magic than they would with each other. She decided to create more compound flames, seeing how the added magic would strengthen and alter the fire itself. None of her research lasted very long, so she devised a plan. If the Witch would go and create more Catastrophes, why not the Mother? Twelve times, her most proud research into fire became milestones engraved on the world in new Catastrophes. It was only when the Dragon of the Infernal Grove was born that she stopped, for she could not touch the dragon without being scorched herself. Her research could go no further, and the child that could carry her legacy was a mindless beast.

The Mother of Hellfire wields a vermillion flame that sputters and sparks with blood. The quintessential hellfire that she produced burned stone like wood and spread with a mind of its own towards living beings. Those consumed by the hellfire are said to have their soul burnt away before their body perishes. Despite the destructive nature of it, temples to the Mother have collected hellfire and placed it in their sacred braziers, welcoming her blessings despite her perverted perfectionism.

As a major religious figure, the Mother of Hellfire's fame spreads to her Vessel as well. The Vessel of the Mother is often heralded as a chosen prophet of sorts; ironic seeing as most of them gained the title after killing the previous Vessel. The Mother of Hellfire's Vessel is welcomed into every temple to the Mother and given very preferential treatment. They are the celebrity of the Vessels, and have been since the initial sealing of the Catastrophes so long ago.

Amorphous Pestilence

Shambling around in a formal suit and wearing a suspicious scarf, Jovannas wandered from city to city, leaving behind only mangled and pus-filled corpses along the cobbled roads. Known worldwide as the Amorphous Pestilence, this Catastrophe's trail of death extended to all living beings. Anything that came near the mysteriously dressed man would be consumed by horrible convulsions and discoloration, their body ceasing to move and leaking foul pus-like compounds. The original forms of whatever suffered at his hands was lost, unrecognizable. While exposure to the remains of his wanderings isn't guaranteed to be lethal, they cause severe illness in anyone who comes into contact with them for thousands of years after the body dies.

Not much can be said about the Pestilence's personality. By the nature of his ability, he had to be alone for his whole life. Perhaps he travelled to the cities of the Brymasti and Astrins because he wished for social connection. Maybe he just enjoyed seeing their bodies deform and expire. Or perhaps he had no mind at all, merely wandering the world aimlessly and happening upon unfortunate amounts of people. Watchers from afar have noted that he looked up at the sky a surprising amount.

The Amorphous Pestilence "wielded" a power known as the Omnipresent Plague. While normally a passive radius of inescapable and universal pathogen, it could be channeled or strengthened, even altered to give different effects. The knowledge of the active portion of the Omnipresent plague is entirely due to the succession of Vessels of the Amorphous Pestilence, as the actual Catastrophe had no social connections or need to alter the properties of the plague.

Laments of the Departed

Meren is an ancient Astrin word for grief. It is only fitting that this was the name of the Catastrophe that feeds off of such emotions. The Laments of the Departed was what appeared to be an amalgam of the souls of the deceased. This was not the case, however, as it was actually a small orb that added apparitions of the deceased to itself when it fed on grief. Over the thousands of years it existed before its first sealing, the Laments grew to an enormous size, becoming something resembling a whirlwind of ghosts. It called out to the living in the voices of their loved ones, urging them to save them from its grasp. All a ruse. It killed the gullible people and absorbed their energy into itself.

The Laments of the Departed was not just a wailing cacophony of apparitions. It had a set of abilities that seemed specially designed to kill unsuspecting prey. Its mimicry of the dead is the most well-known, but among its other abilities are inducing deep and physically impeding sadness and creating spiritual lightning from the energy it has absorbed over the millennia.

The power it wielded, known as Tortuous Lament, stems from the regrets and grief of its surroundings. The Vessels of the Laments have used the absorption process of these emotions to help people across Brimstata, strengthening their own power in the process. With the emotions they collect, the Vessels of this Catastrophe have been creating unique methods of subduing criminals or other enemies for many millennia.

Dragon of the Tempest

The Dragon of the Tempest, Kratatheryx, was created when the Witch of Armageddon found herself in a thunderstorm. Taking inspiration from its lightning, she caught a bolt of it and molded it into a serpent-like form, whispering her soft lullaby of corruption into the white-hot arc. The lightning became the Dragon of the Tempest, and while its legless form may have hindered much of its destructive capabilities, it still cracked the skies in half with its raging storms.

Kratatheryx was not known for wreaking havoc in cities or on land. It passed through the upper skies at rapid speeds, leaving a trail of enormous storm clouds in its wake. Reducing deserts to flooded mud plains, setting forests on fire and hurling the trees around, and sending chains of tornadoes across open steppe, the Dragon of the Tempest was feared more for its effects on the local landscape more than the actual lethality of its proper form.

The sky-splitting lightning that Kratatheryx unleashed with its mighty roars became the weapon of its future Vessels. Granting with it the power to control the weather, at least locally, the lightning that the Vessel of the Dragon of the Tempest wields is the strongest pure lightning of any Catastrophe.

Hadal Spectre

Shiloth slept at the bottom of Brimstata's deepest ocean undisturbed for thousands of years. Slowly meditating and absorbing the essence of the world around it, this Hadal Spectre grew in power without fighting at all. It was once called the Peaceful Catastrophe. However, the immense beast decided one day to lift its head out of the sea, carrying with its presence a crippling wave of madness for miles around. Connected with Brimstata on a psychic level, the Spectre had gained a form almost impossible to comprehend and knowledge beyond any mortal being.

The Spectre remained at the bottom of the ocean until the Hero of Brimstata travelled to it with his trusted friends and killed it, taking part of its soul and implanting it in the first of its Vessels. The person chosen to be its Vessel had fortified their spiritual self and knowledge of magic to an extreme degree, just barely allowing them to accept the power without mentally breaking.

The power that the Hadal Spectre wielded is known as Depth Glimmers, appearing as little glowing orbs of liquid light. Within them are the capabilities to command pressure and motion, to unleash madness and crippling psychological weight, and to peer into the minds of others. The Vessel succession process for the Spectre is more voluntary, as the previous Vessel gives their successor decades of spiritual training before allowing themselves to be killed for the harvest. Because of the requirements to contain the Hadal Spectre's Echo Fragment, its Vessels have always had a reputation for being mysterious and otherworldly.

Lantern of Frost

At the heart of the blizzard at the North lay Krisvatan, the Lantern of Frost. Now the mantle of tending to the Northern snows passes to her Vessel, but the legends remain the same. A woman seemingly made of ice and draped in robes of snow, the Lantern of Frost found people lost in her blizzard and beckoned them with her ice-white lantern of cold flame. Guiding them back to her tower, she waited until they had settled in before locking them in a room. She allowed the blizzard to flow in, giving the traveler an impossible task to complete in order to earn their freedom. Of course, none made it out.

The Lantern of Frost delighted in her little game of hospitality. Her cold smile widened ever so slightly when she saw the realization in her prisoners' eyes that they could not escape. Even those with robust flames could not melt the ice she created, at least not for long enough to escape from her icy tomb. She danced through the long and tall hallways of her palace, humming to herself in the sounds of glaciers shifting.

The Lantern of Frost was a cruel deceiver to all except the Hero of Brimstata. Wielding ice and cold itself with enough strength and diligence to make blizzards blow for millennia, the Lantern shuffled across a graveyard buried in snow. Once killed, her power was transferred to the first of her Vessels. Known as the Core of Frigidity, this power allows the Vessel to be immune to all cold and frost, and control them as well. It is the antithesis of the Brymasti's culture of magic. It is said that the heart of the Lantern's Vessel will be partially frozen over, taking their empathy in exchange for the gelid mistress' abilities.

Almighty Reflection

The dragon of nacreous mirrors, Celespharix, the Almighty Reflection that peers into the souls and thoughts of all who dare gaze up upon her magnificent form. The Witch of Armageddon delighted when the simple shard of glass she found became such a regal-looking creature. Millions of facets of shimmering reflective crystal make up the beast's body, creating warped reflections of the world within. When one peers into the eyes of their distorted self within the dragon, it is said that all of the flaws and thoughts they keep secret shift into the outward appearance of what they see.

Celespharix was the only one of the Three Catastrophic Dragons with a semblance of intelligence. While rumored that she gained this intelligence from the people she was around, memory archives from the Witch's Echo Fragment show that she had knowledge of Brymasti language from the time she became a part of the world. Her speech carried a tone of unshakable superiority and pity for those below her. She sighed with the sound of crystal shards scraping against each other, disdain in every second of her lustrous existence.

Almighty Reflection's main ability was to manipulate the glasslike crystal that makes up her body to an impossibly precise degree. She would often simply kill those who came near with a needlelike shard of her body like a tiny beam of light straight to the heart. When her victims were fast enough to avoid that, she would overwhelm them with a glistening blizzard of razor-sharp pieces of herself. Avoiding this would result in Celespharix's true wrath: summoning multitudes of crystal copies of her victims, forcing them to fight off many versions of themselves. This ability, called the Omnividite Shards, has been passed on to her Vessels and been expanded upon. The shards apparently had the latent ability to redirect Essence through either reflection or refraction, as if it were light.

The Vessels of the Almighty Reflection gain a sheen to their bodies. They make noises like ice sculptures as they walk and see through the thoughts of others. When cut, they do not bleed. When bludgeoned, they shatter. So long as the core in their hearts is not destroyed, the Vessels of Celespharix can recover from any injury. The cost of this is said to be the detached regal pity of the Catastrophe, and the violent nature that accompanies it.

Harbinger of Drought

The once lush jungle now remains a billowing, scorched ocean of sand. The skies seem to mock the inhospitable wastes below as the crumbling ruins of a once thriving town are slowly buried under the pale beige sea. The Sun Ring beats down upon the world below in a way its decrepit visage never could. All hope is lost for the return of life to this place, for it has been tainted by the Harbinger of Drought.

Her true name was Haeshasi, but none who encountered her knew that. Wherever she walked, the dirt would dry and crack until all that was left was sand. In her wanderings, she made many trails across the world, which would later become the centers of long roads, However, the Harbinger of Drought was not remotely useful. She lingered in towns for weeks, draining the water from the atmosphere, the people, the world around her. Within three months, all the people were mummified husks and the heat of the day beat down upon the parched air like no other place in the world.

The Harbinger's hums and whistles can be heard in the winds of her deserts, even after her sealing and death. No reversal of her ability seems to work for longer than a week, requiring immense effort to push back even a small village's worth of the arid biome. Only two known permanent undoings of this exist on Brimstata: One oasis where the Hero first sealed her, and one where she was finally slain during the Wrathmoon.

It remains unknown what the Witch of Armageddon corrupted to create such a passive and yet destructive Catastrophe. Perhaps it was the essence of a desert she found her way to. Regardless, the subtle and slow cruelty of the Harbinger of Drought served to decimate many of Brimstata's shattered landmasses and turned them into a region known as the Desiccated Sea. The ocean becomes thick and briny here, and the only land for enormous stretches of distance is inhospitable desert. The permanent scars that the Harbinger left upon the world are more than any other Catastrophe could lay claim to.

The Vessels of the Harbinger of Drought wield her signature Dune Song, calling and bending many aspects of the environment. They can pull water from almost any material, set the air ablaze with unignited flame, move sand as their own limbs, and orchestrating sharp winds. They do not cause the passive desertification that the actual Harbinger did, but they may still wreak famine across the world as they see fit.

Grieving Sun

An armored man with absurdly long golden hair and the ring of the Sun itself as his crown let out another defeated sigh. Corpses lay around him yet again, and not one had put so much as a scratch on his armor. He could not be killed by any warrior with even the slightest tinge of empathy. The miserable tale he wove of tragedy was a lie that even the Grieving Sun himself was convinced of. Born of the unattainable false light of the Sun Ring, Lelibas the Grieving Sun was the Witch of Armageddon's only other experiment with twisting a religious figure.

While the Sun Ring's Faithful did not alter their faith to fit the visage of this new Catastrophe, the Grieving Sun saw the faith as a testament to the weakness he felt inside. His tears flowed on the battlefield, becoming glowing drops of honey-colored light and spinning into unfathomably sharp rings. While recounting hymns to his supposed lost daughter and lamenting his alleged fall from the heavens, the bladeless hilt he wielded became the cradle for a circular saw of illuminant death.

The Grieving Sun's demeanor did not match his methods. Wielding a halo of gleaming light above a hilt of engraved stone, he mercilessly dismembered all who opposed him. For all his crying and stories, he was still a Catastrophe. A city was once unfortunate enough to cross paths with his bereaved wanderings. No survivors remained in the aftermath, and a poem the size of the city was written in rubble and blood. At times, it appeared the Grieving Sun did not even notice how he murdered people.

Eventually slain by the Hero's most heartless companion, the Solar Tears passed on to the future Vessels of the Grieving Sun. Ironically, the power needed to slay the Catastrophe almost completely prevented the use of his power. The first Vessel of the Grieving Sun was said to have used artificial liquids and gases to get the Tears of light flowing to decimate his foes. Rotational energy forges the tears of the wielder into nigh-unbreakable rings that can then be controlled by the one who released them. However, a sliver of the Grieving Sun's delusion is said to infect each one of his Vessels.

Onyx King

As the Sun Ring created the Grieving Sun, the Midnight Eye was so corrupted to become Modos, the Onyx King. Unlike the sniveling wielder of repentant light, the King brandished a crown of a thousand onyx swords that bent to his will. Attacking only in the night, the Onyx King was a supposedly silent killer, though the howling winds at night were attributed to his victims' unfortunate cries.

The Onyx King was a master of undoing peoples' psyches slowly. Robbing them of sense after sense and slowly encircling them until all they could perceive was through the lens of pain, the wispy laugh of this Catastrophe was a signal of inescapable death. He was a vicious killer, unraveling the bodies of people with the size-changing onyx shards of his crown or skinning them with coarse clouds of ash. The victims could not sense it, but they knew that he was smiling with his wicked toothy grin at their mangled bodies.

Gifted with the ability to hinder the senses of people with clouds of incredibly fine particles, the Onyx King wielded a malevolent power known as Nightash. When entering the body, it can shut off certain sensations. Outside of the body, it allows acute alteration of local environmental factors as if it were an extension of the wielder's body. Testing by the Onyx King's Vessels has shown that Nightash is actually incapable of reducing pain, but can be used to amplify it to over a billion times its normal sensitivity. The cruelty of the Onyx King's methods is said to leak into the core of each one of his Vessels, turning their hearts just a little more sadistic when they fought.

Wolf of the Typhoon

At the edge of the coasts, there were two wolves. One lay beyond the shore, frolicking in the violent seas. The other stayed on land, mournfully howling at the open ocean. The one of the sea, Kerysbos, was responsible for maritime destruction of impeccable degree. More often called the Wolf of the Typhoon, this giant seafoam-colored lupine beast plagued sailors of Brimstata for millennia. Able to call cataclysmic hurricanes and flood entire cities, the Wolf's visage is still seen in the howling winds of the monsoon.

The Wolf of the Typhoon was not malicious in nature; it simply reveled in the chaos of the seas, the turbulent waves and crackling stormy skies. Though it didn't mean harm intentionally, its kill count was likely in the billions. It traveled across the ocean, creating a permanent typhoon wherever it went. Cities noticed the storm before it arrived, but they could never evacuate in time. The Wolf was simply too fast, sprinting across the open ocean towards any landmass it saw.

The Wolf of the Typhoon was said to be attracted to valuable metals and gems like a magnet. Sailors had to be quick and make sure their route was far away from the Wolf, lest their ship be sunk by its gargantuan paws. Given the incredible speed of the Catastrophe, sailing was almost impossible for commercial purposes back in the Era of Cataclysm.

Though sealed by the Hero, its Hell Typhoon remains in the Vessels as a supreme power. Giving them boons when out at sea, giving them the power to call the raging maelstroms the Wolf once did, and granting the ability to run on water. The chaotic essence of the Hell Typhoon is hard to master, but Vessels of the Wolf manage to find freedom in its power.

Hellhound of the Mist

At the edge of the coasts, there were two wolves. One lay beyond the shore, frolicking in the violent seas. The other stayed on land, mournfully howling at the open ocean. The one of the land, Kharobos, was the herald of a slow, creeping death over many coastal towns. While one of the weaker Catastrophes, it still killed millions during the millennia it roamed the world.

The Hellhound of the Mist's five white eyes pierced through the foggy nights it brought with it. The silver sheen of its fur allowed its slender body to blend in with the vaporous blanket it brought with it. The somber howling of the Hellhound brought true fear to many, for its curse was a slow and terrible one. Those caught within the fog of the Hellhound of the Mist would lose their memories, senses, or ability to command parts of their bodies. Each night one inhaled the fog, they would be afflicted with this curse again. While the Hellhound could travel across the entire world in a week, it seemed to linger for far longer than welcome in coastal port cities.

The Hellhound of the Mist was created by the Witch of Armageddon after she got lost in the fog whilst wandering near the sea. Taking inspiration from the obscuring of her surroundings, she created a creature to reside within and add an element of fear to the already eerie weather. The howls of the Hellhound can be heard only within the fog, pounding against doors and flowing through streets as a wispy echo.

The Hellhound of the Mist became a legend to incite fear into children, urging them to close and lock their windows when a foggy night approached. Elderly people who suffered memory loss were said to be sinking into Kharobos' maw. The Hellhound of the Mist eventually became synonymous with old age, as the silver hair and thinner bodies of the elderly resembled aspects of Kharobos itself; accompanying age-related diseases helped solidify the image.

The Vessels of Kharobos are said to have impeccable memory, lustrous silver hair, and a white glint in their eye regardless of light. The Unfeeling Mist they wield carries with it the weight of age and time that the Hellhound of the Mist encapsulates, despite not aging its victims whatsoever. The thematic burden of the power is said to be heavy on the shoulders of the Vessels.

Innovators of Hellfire

The Mother of Hellfire's perfectionist drive to create the true, pure flame led her to create twelve children, Catastrophes more powerful than herself, in order to reach the apotheosis of fire. She would have continued, had her twelfth creation not been too powerful for even her to handle.

Commissions of the Mother

Three times, the Mother of Hellfire begged for the Witch of Armageddon to give her new Catastrophes to study, to give her concepts that could be altered to help create the perfect fire. Three times, the Witch obliged, delighting in the Mother's maddening spiral of research and toil. The most unusual of the Catastrophes, these three bore the parentage of the Witch and the Mother, neither of whom acted to raise the damned curses.

Palladium Scales

Ranking in Power of the Catastrophes

Name	Rank	Primary Power Name	Origin	Vessel
Witch of Armageddon	1	Empty Fire	Original	Meirritz Zayshylor
Dragon of the Infernal Grove	2	Grove Inferno	Mother	Shu'dai Orikawa
Cosmic Serpent Mooneater	3	Violet Flames of Lunation	Mother	Adrian Iophetix
Hadal Spectre	4	Depth Glimmers	Witch	Mirosi Vien
Divine Burning One	5	Godflame	Mother	Ana Makataru
Onyx King	6	Nightash	Witch	Galen Morisa
Grieving Sun	7	Solar Tears	Witch	Valerie Bitorax